Book learning? I don’t recall where he went to college, if that’s what you’re asking. In any event, being a foreign correspondent for 3 years in Africa qualifies you as more than a dilettante at least as far as Africa is concerned. And foreign correspondents, for all their highfalutin’ book learnin’, are always pretty tough guys. Spend 3 years keeping an eye out for AK-47 toting highwaymen and corrupt policemen and you’ll be tough, too.
Again, don’t misunderstand; he’s grateful for their sacrifice. He would have preferred they not have to make it…but he’s glad that they did. Keep in mind that slaves in this country were often slaves in their native countries sold by tribal chieftains to white slavetraders, yielding an uncomfortable truth: every slave bought by a white was sold by another black. It’s hard to say what the lives of the slaves and their descendents would have been like if they had stayed.
In any case, consider reading his book. I have a hard time believing that my meager postings on the subject accurately relate his experiences over there. I read his book some years ago…who knows, perhaps my recollection doesn’t do his work justice.
My apologies if it seemed I was highjacking the conversation, but I thought I was simply acknowledging the hijacking already in progress.
And I do realize that personal swipes are wrong. But it’s difficult to avoid when You repeatedly wants to direct every issue in this thread back towards himself.
So, here’s what I have to say:
My race and personal experiences are not relevant to the topic of this thread. You, your race and personal experiences are not relevant to the topic of this thread. There are about 35,000,000 black people in this country. So it’s impossible to discuss common black experiences (and that was the topic of the OP) without a certain amount of abstraction and realization that there will be numerous exceptions to every generality.
If you want to discuss the experience of mixed racial Americans and how they are perceived by American society; fine, it’s an interesting topic. But start a new thread. And if you want to start a thread on your own personal experiences involving race or a more general thread in which people can relate their own individual racial experiences and opinions; again, feel free to start a new thread on the subject.
And, once again, stop claiming you’re posting what I think on subjects when you clearly don’t know.
Secondly, I’m not talking about “my race and personal experiences”. Where are you getting this from? Everything that I’ve been talking about has been relevant to the question at hand. Do you think the one-drop rule was my idea? Wow, that’s some funny stuff right there.
I haven’t been talking about exceptions at all. So I have no idea what you are talking about. It’s funny, though, how you keep lecturing me about who and what black people are, as if I don’t know these things myself. Just in case you don’t know, I’m black. I’m 100% black. But I’ve probably got just as much Euro blood in my veins as I’ve got African. So please wrap your mind around that before you lecture me about abstractions. This debate is not abstract to me because my ethnic group is the subject of this thread.
The slaves would not have been captured and sold to the whites if there had been no market for them, so I fail to see why this is such an “uncomfortable truth”. Had there been no Trans Atlantic slave trade, there would have been little impetus behind the destruction and disruption of so many conquered tribes. Supply and demand in effect.
Exactly. Which is why I’d question why anyone would feel grateful for an event that had some a powerful impact on history that, had it not taken place, the world would probably be such a radically different place.
So who do you blame for the heroin trade, the junkies or the pushers? The pushers wouldn’t be in the business if it weren’t for the junkies, and the junkies couldn’t feed their habits without the pushers.
No matter how you look at it, Africans had a large share of the responsibility for the slave trade, and trying to ignore or play down that aspect of history is dishonest.
I’m stating the facts, not putting blame on anyone. The blame game serves no purpose in this thread. A honest protrayal of history does, though.
This rather profound statement has no bearing on anything. But your analogy is far from an apt one. Drugs are physiologicaly addictive, so there is a disease component to the heroin trade. A pusher is taking advantage of his customer’s disease, which is the main reason drug dealers are so despised. The African chieftans, however, were not taking advantage of the Europeans at all. They were providing goods much in the same way that a vendor supplies fruit to a retailer. Those goods were in the form of human beings.
And playing it up is just as dishonest. Good thing me and you aren’t doing that, right?
You, I want you to read these two quotes and see if you can understand what I’m talking about:
I realize that by responding to you I am contributing to the very diversion I am trying to discourage. I regret this. So once again, if you want to discuss this topic please start up a new thread.
LN, you’ve advanced the discussion not one whit. All you’ve done is said I’m wrong, called me a hypocrite, and then accused me making a thread about me when none of my points about the one-drop rule and slavery concern me at all. I asked you questions to get a sense of where you’re coming from, but you ignore them.
Potshots and weakass gotcha games are poor form in GD. Just sayin’.
The economics of slavery and how it affected the South was - well not initally - but probably mosdt famously discussed in the book Time on the Cross by Bob Fogel and Stanley Engerman (Fogel won the Nobel Prize in economics for his analysis of history through economics in 1993). Since it’s release it has been very controversial, partially because some folks view it as an apology for slavery (which I find ludicrous as I was a T.A. for Engerman) and more so for it’s conclusions. It’s conclusions were in it’s most simple form, that slavery was profitible, more so than similar workers in the North. That slaves were in fact very good workers,good “capital” investments and was not an economic drag on the region.
The bbok was written 32 years ago and I would not deign to try an defend the research, since I am sure it has spawned countless research papers that dispell or challenge some of their conclusions made all that time ago. I do not know how well their arguments have held up over time.
But if you are truly interested in the questions of slavery nad the econimics of the South you should start with this book, with a critical eye, of course.
Yes, I have been intentionally ignoring your requests for me to say where I’m “coming from”. This post isn’t about you or me. So it would be wrong for me to start talking about my personal experiences in this thread. And it would be hypocritical of me to do so when I’ve repeatedly asked you not to do the same.
So in other words, you can’t support your assertion that my “racial beliefs are untrue.” And you’re not even willing to explain the premises of the OP, as you see them.
What makes you think that the opinion of black people on how things are going for them shouldn’t be considered in answering the question “Are black people better off?”, anyway? I don’t understand this demand for ‘no personal experiences’. Isn’t the answer to the question, such as it can be answered given its questionable premise, a composite of personal experiences?
As I pointed out before, there are 35,000,000 black people in America. I doubt we’ll see more than four or five thousand posting in this thread. So we’re not going to get a composite that will add up to a meaningful total.
Let me put it this way, if the issue being discussed was “Do black people get a fair share of political power in America?” and Condi Rice showed up and posted “Sure black people have political power - look at me, I’m black and I’m the Secretary of State.” Wouldn’t you agree that her post on her personal experience, while true, does not really address the experience of black people in general?
No, in order to address the issue of whether black people as a whole, as opposed to some black individuals, have a fair share of political power, you have to ignore the individuals and look at the millions. What’s the percentage of elected officials who are black in comparison to the percentage of citizens who are black? Are black people statistically more likely to lose their voting rights than people of other races? Do black minorities in white majority voting groups have recognizably different voting patterns? All of these issues are meaningful to the discussion but none of them have answers that are based on one individuals race or personal experience.
That’s a good question and one I don’t have a good answer for. We seem to be heading off in another direction and I have no reason for wanting to join you. So I think the best choice for me is to leave now.
Little Nemo, your last post is a milieu of confusion. Never once did you with the face post about her personal experiences. Even if she had, so what? You can’t find anything wrong with what she said, and instead of admitting that, you make up something stupid to get huffy about.
At this place in the thread, I have no idea what actual dispute is and I suspect that the participants may be arguing separate and only tangentially related points, sidetracked by responses in which each has misunderstood what the other appeared to be trying to say. I would guess that simply re-focusing on the topic of the thread and letting the current exchange drop behind as an innocent misunderstanding–no harm, no foul–would be the best way to handle it.
No, read the book and you will understand Richburg’s situation was a LOT more extreme than that.
Richburg was a journalist covering the major conflicts in mid-1990s Africa. He was in the Sudan, South Africa after Apartheid, Liberia’s civil war, Somalia during the American intervention in Mogadishu, and Rwanda during the genocide. He was NOT some tourist touring around the Serengeti. He saw some of the most brutal sides of Africa, and was utterly devastated by them. Here’s an excerpt from the book:
Richburg doesn’t hate Africa, but by the end of the book he is unable to love Africa. Besides the personal trials he faced, one of his friends was killed by a car bomb and two more were beaten to death by an enraged South African mob. He was also witness to unrelieving poverty, violence, and hopelessness. The horrors he saw were too much for him. At the end, he says <i>“I am a stranger [in Africa]. I am an American, a black American. And I feel no connection to this strange and violent place. Africa chewed me up and spit me back out again.</i>”
And so it has to be asked again. What does the experience of one person, have to do with the millions of others alive and dead in determining whether or not millions of other people are better off living in America after slavery versus living in Africa if chattle slavery had never existed?